The present invention pertains generally to inventory control and, more particularly, to a method and system for determining item quantity inventory of a defined container using an RF (radio frequency) signal.
The availability of inventory technology coupled with the sales downturn and increased operating costs of recent recessionary periods have combined to force retailers to meet competitors' aggressive pricing by using more stringent inventory control techniques. The hidden costs associated with excess inventory or overstocking in the competitive retail industry are critically important. Large retailers estimate that the true cost of carrying inventory is on the order of 40% of the cost of the item per year. Moreover, the more inventory, the more manpower is required for inventory control. Most importantly to the retail food and drug trade, however, overstocking results in inflexible pricing. In many stores, electronic cash registers at the checkout counters have been replaced by computerized point of sale terminals. Optical scanners and bar codes on products, while posing other problems, allow flexible pricing and computerized real time inventory control and automated stock ordering. All in all, the various types of material requirement planning systems available today throughout the retail, wholesale and manufacturing sectors have become a indispensable tool of cost control.
Establishing precise control over retail inventory, however, requires more than reading bar codes at the checkout counter. In order to be purchased, products have to not only be ordered but delivered, uncrated, unboxed, marked and moved from the stock room onto the shelves or peg racks in the retail store. Even overstocked items will fail to reach the checkout counter unless they are on the shelf. Furthermore, because of pilferage, the actual inventory may vary from the inventory calculated by checkout counter systems.
Taking inventory for reordering or restocking of shelves is time consuming but essential, particularly where individual stores stock thousands of shelf items. Shelf stock-taking should be fast and inexpensive to encourage daily adjustments. However, today shelf inventory taken by visual inspection often requires manipulation of individual products on a display rack. For example, in order to reorder greeting cards, typically an employee needs to look at each and every pocket in a card cabinet, determine if the number of cards is at or below the reorder point, retrieve the reorder ticket from the back of the pocket and scan it to record a reorder. This is a very labor intensive, expensive, and error prone process which, if automated, could allow for unattended monitoring of overall inventory by detecting and summing the product quantities of all pockets in a cabinet.
The automated inventory counters of the prior art typically utilize unique tags corresponding to each specific item. However, this requires a user to manage each unique tag and to maintain some type of local data base which stores the meaning of each tag's unique identifier in order to properly interpret the reading. These prior art counters are designed only to determine quantity of a plurality of different products.
Other inventory counters of the prior art, use features such as weight or opacity to determine quantity. However, these prior art counters are unsuitable for products which have varying weights, dimension, or other characteristics.
Thus, there is a need for an automated inventory counter which determines quantity of products, as well as allows for unattended monitoring of overall inventory by detecting when, how often, and from which display products are picked up and replaced by consumers who are browsing a department.
Additional objects, advantages and novel features of the invention will be set forth in part in the description which follows, and in part will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon examination of the following or may be learned by practice of the invention. The objects and advantages of the invention may be realized and attained by means of instrumentalities and combinations particularly pointed out in the appended claims.